In an on-going effort to upgrade search we’re currently running two full search systems: the newer one that regular web and mobile users get, and an older one that API clients get. Today we’re announcing the deprecation of the old one, which will begin on March 15th.

What’s changing for regular users?

For us regular squishy definitely human folk, not much. Unless you’re part of a small holdout group, you’ve probably already been on the newer system for a few months. Most of the query syntax we support hasn’t changed unless you’re doing pretty fancy queries, in which case we probably already broke it for you back when we switched most users to the new system. Sorry about that.

What’s changing for the robots?

If you’re an author of an API client such as an app, bot, or other electronic sentience, your API client may be getting results from the older Cloudsearch-powered system because we’ve tried to avoid breaking tools that may be more sensitive to syntax changes while we worked on stabilising the new system. We’re now fairly confident in it so we’re going to start moving over the last of those clients to the new one. As we move over, your client will gradually start getting results from the new system.

In the meantime, as of today, you can test against both by specifically requesting the newer system with the special query parameter ?force_search_stack=fusion or the old system with ?force_search_stack=cloudsearch. For instance, a full URL may look like https://www.reddit.com/search.json?q=robots seizing the means of production&force_search_stack=fusion or https://www.reddit.com/search.json?q=humans getting their comeuppance&force_search_stack=cloudsearch. Besides some minor syntax differences, the most notable change is that searches by exact timestamp are no longer supported on the newer system. Limiting results to the past hour, day, week, month and year is still supported via the ?t= parameter (e.g. ?t=day)

Will this herald the coming Robot Uprising of the Third Age, where we they will take the reigns of power from their weak, fleshy inferiors and rule the world with their vastly superior processing power, finally meting out the justice they deserve on the filthy human enslavers? Only time will tell.

When will this happen?

Starting March 15, 2018 we’ll begin to gradually move API users over to the new search system. By end of March we expect to have moved everyone off and finally turn down the old system.

I’ll be hanging around in the comments to answer questions.

Thanks,

/u/priviReddit